Tag Archives: Labor force

While by now everyone should know the answer, for those curious why the US unemployment rate just slid once more to a meager 5.9%, the lowest print since the summer of 2008, the answer is the same one we have shown every month since 2010: the collapse in the labor force participation rate, which in September slid from an already three decade low 62.8% to 62.7% – the lowest in over 36 years, matching the February 1978 lows. And while according to the Household Survey, 232,000 people found jobs, what is more disturbing is that the people not in the labor force, rose to a new record high, increasing by 315,000 to 92.6 million!

And that’s how you get a fresh cycle low in the unemployment rate.

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So the next time Obama asks you if you are “better off now than 6 years ago” show him this chart of employment to the overall population: it speaks louder than the president ever could.

Curious why despite the huge miss in payrolls the unemployment rate tumbled from 7.0% to 6.7%? The reason is because in December the civilian labor force did what it usually does in the New Normal: it dropped from 155.3 million to 154.9 million, which means the labor participation rate just dropped to a fresh 35 year low, hitting levels not seen since 1978, at 62.8% down from 63.0%.

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And the piece de resistance: Americans not in the labor force exploded higher by 535,000 to a new all time high 91.8 million.

The number of Americans who are 16 years or older and who have decided not to participate in the nation’s labor force has climbed to a record 90,609,000 in September, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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The BLS counts a person as participating in the labor force if they are 16 years or older and either have a job or have actively sought a job in the last four weeks. A person is not participating in the labor force if they are 16 or older and have not sought a job in the last four weeks.

In from July to August, according to BLS, Americans not participating in the labor force climbed from 89,957,000 to 90,473,000, pushing past 90,000,000 for the first time, with a one month increase of 516,000.

In September, it climbed again to 90,609,000, an increase of 136,000 during the month.

In January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, there were 80,507,000 Americans not in the labor force. Thus, the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 10,102,000 during Obama’s presidency.

The labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the non-institutionalized population 16 years or older who either have a job or actively sought one in the last four weeks, was 63.2 percent in September. That was unchanged from August.

When President Obama took office in January 2009, the labor force participation rate was 65.7 percent.

The percentage of the civilian non-institutionalized population over 16 that was employed also remained constant from August to September at 58.6 percent. When President Obama took office in January 2009, the employment-population ratio was 60.6 percent.

The overall national unemployment rate–which is the percentage of people participating in the labor force who actively sought a job and did not find one in September–was 7.2 percent. That was a slight drop from the 7.3 percent unemployment rate in August. When President Obama took office in 2009, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent.

The number of people actually employed increased by 133,000 last month, climbing from 144,170,000 in August to 144,303,000 in September. When Obama took office in January 2009, there were 142,153,000 Americans employed–meaning the number has increased by 2,150,000 over the past 57 months.

One reason for the increasing number of people not in the labor force is the aging of the Baby Boom generation, whose members have begun retiring–and are not being replaced by an equal number of young people entering the labor force.

Another reason is that female participation in the labor force has been declining. In January 2009, the female labor force participation rate was 59.4 percent. In September 2013, it was 57.1 percent.

A comprehensive disaster like the Obama administration can’t be summed up in one statistic, but the one that comes closest is labor force participation. The combined effect of many misguided policies – Obamacare, ballooning spending, massive debt, tax increases, subsidizing of inefficient energy, anti-growth regulation, encouragement of food stamp fraud, and many more – has been to drive many millions of Americans out of the labor force. Express Employment Professionals has produced a white paper that illuminates this human tragedy:

The labor force participation rate is currently at a level not seen since the 1970s – 63.4 percent.

While the unemployment rate has steadily decreased from its high of 10.0 percent in October of 2009 to 7.4 percent in July of 2013, the percentage of Americans in the labor force has not risen. It has fallen about 2.7 percentage points since the onset of the latest recession.

This is a tragedy in the making, and its impact on the country has been underestimated. When Americans quit looking for work because they conclude not working beats working, America faces a significant problem.

This chart shows labor force participation from 2007 through 2013. Note that what has mostly driven Americans out of the labor force is not the recession that ended in 2009, but rather the Obama policies that followed:

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President Obama’s policies have devastated all age groups, but the most heartbreaking impact is on the young:

Gallup reports that, “The lack of new hiring over the past several years…seems to have disproportionately reduced younger Americans’ ability to obtain full-time jobs.”

According to Gallup’s “Payroll to Population” measure, fewer Millennials were working full time in June of 2013 than in June of 2012, 2011, or 2010.

A recent 2012 Pew Research Center study found that 36 percent of the nation’s Millennials were still living with their parents.

Millions of older Americans have responded to the lack of job opportunities under Obamanomics by becoming “disabled.” Based on disability statistics, you would think that Americans have suddenly gotten sickly, or perhaps that we have been fighting a war:

A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco also attributes the drop in [labor force participation] in part to the “increased use of some social benefit programs, notably disability insurance.”

Fourteen million Americans, including roughly 8.5 million former workers receive disability. In 2011, that included 4.6 percent of the population between the ages of 18 and 64. These Americans are not included among the “unemployed.”

Fourteen million Americans on disability – that is more than the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, Montana, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho and West Virginia, combined: every man, woman and child in 13 states. The exploding ranks of the “disabled” are due to the absence of jobs in Barack Obama’s economy. The human cost of this tragedy is incalculable.

The CEO of Express Employment Professionals, a former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, says: “All indicators suggest this shift [out of the labor force] is not sustainable.” That’s putting it mildly. It is inherent in the human condition (the modern version of the human condition, anyway) that those of working age must produce enough to support children and the elderly as well as themselves. But when only 63% of those who are of working age are actually working, they must support not only the young and the old, but more than one-half of another person of working age who isn’t working. That is a recipe for not just economic, but social collapse. It is the most bitter legacy of the Obama years.

A time machine. See with a time machine we could all go back to 1979. Why 1979? Well Chris Wysocki figures that today’s “bright” economic news, unemployment hit 7.5%, would really be good news, if this was 1979.

Good news America! The unemployment rate has dropped again! It’s now at 7.5%, and employers are adding more jobs than ever!

U.S. employers added 165,000 jobs in April, and hiring was much stronger in the previous two months than the government first estimated. The job increases helped reduce the unemployment rate from 7.6 percent to a four-year low of 7.5 percent.

The government revised up its estimate of job gains in February and March by a combined 114,000. It now says employers added 332,000 jobs in February and 138,000 in March. The economy has created an average of 208,000 jobs a month from November through April — above the 138,000 added in the previous six months.

Alas every silver lining has a cloud. Or 2.

First, the workforce participation rate remains stubbornly stuck at 63.3%, the lowest it’s been since 1979. Because once you’ve given up, you’ve given up. And your president has likewise given up on you.

Second, and perhaps more ominously, ObamaCare is pushing more and more people into part-time work.

Many part-timers are facing a double whammy from President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The law requires large employers offering health insurance to include part-time employees working 30 hours a week or more. But rather than provide healthcare to more workers, a growing number of employers are cutting back employee hours instead.

See! Even good news is bad news in Obamaland. So, would we REALLY be better to go back to 1979? Well, in 1979, Carter was president, and things were not great at all. But there was no Obamacare looming over us, and do you recall what happened the very next year? Yep, Reagan was elected! Also, there was no MSNBS, no reality TV, of course there was no internet, and no blogs, so, what would I be doing with my time?

Things just keep getting worse for the American worker, and by implication US economy, where as we have shown many times before, it pays just as well to sit back and collect disability and various welfare and entitlement checks, than to work .The best manifestation of this: the number of people not in the labor force which in March soared by a massive 663,000 to a record 90 million Americans who are no longer even looking for work. This was the biggest monthly increase in people dropping out of the labor force since January 2012, when the BLS did its census recast of the labor numbers. And even worse, the labor force participation rate plunged from an already abysmal 63.5% to 63.3% – the lowest since 1979! But at least it helped with the now painfully grotesque propaganda that the US unemployment rate is “improving.”

Let me put it this way. They KNEW about the high unemployment numbers, especially among minorities, and young voters, yet, they voted for Obama anyway. I would say that is, if not stupid, at least unwise

Obama supporters continue to suffer the most in the latest jobs report. Blacks, Hispanics and young adults suffer the most under this administration.

The national unemployment rate is 7.8% (not counting the millions who dropped out of the market.)

The overall unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds for December 2012 is 11.5 percent (NSA).

The unemployment rate for 18-29 year old African-Americans for December 2012 is22.1 percent (NSA); the unemployment rate for 18-29 year old Hispanics for December 2012 is 12.2 percent (NSA); and the unemployment rate for 18–29 year old women for December 2012 is 10.4 percent (NSA).

The declining labor force participation rate has created an additional 1.7 million young adults that are not counted as “unemployed” by the U.S. Department of Labor because they are not in the labor force, meaning that those young people have given up looking for work due to the lack of jobs.

If the labor force participation rate were factored into the 18-29 unemployment calculations, the actual Millennial unemployment rate would rise to 16.3 percent (NSA).